Britain's hefty Harwell Dekatron is back in the Guinness Book of World Records after being recognised - for the second time - as the world's oldest working digital computer.
The 2.5-tonne number-crunching goliath began life at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire, in 1951, and put reliability over …

and the suit from Apple will follow after a swift visit to the patent office. They'll be putting this new vacuum tubes tech in the iphone 6 to make it lighter ;-)

It's great to see it back up and running! I know it's very Beardy but theres something awesome about those old machines, they're not just beige boxes (ok Sun have made some nice kit in their time, but its all just boxes really), stuff with tubes and lights is just so 1970's scifi :-)

And if you talk to the people working on it,

They are immensely knowledgable and keen to share that knowledge.

The gentleman ("I know valves, not computers") who took time out to explain the machine and how it worked to my niece last year, then got her to step it through to demonstrate how it processed a calculation deserves my thanks. If there's been a bar handy, I'd have offered him a pint. Thank you Sir!

Re: And if you talk to the people working on it,

There used to be a bar in the manor house. No idea if they are still licensed. Otherwise head out the main entrance, turn left on to Church Green Road and the Eight Belles is down the bottom on the right.

Dunno why I felt the need to tell you all that but it would be nice to think we could get the engineers / guides sloshed one by one on a daily basis :)

Bletchley Park is awesome.

Re: Bletchley Park is awesome.

If all you want to do is visit the "geek-gasam inducing collection of computers", then you don't want to visit the Bletchley Park Trust as such as their tours cover the war time story (intersting as it is) but don't even include a visit to Colossus any more. What you want to do is visit "The National Museum of Computing" which is a separate museum located on the BP site.

Re: Bletchley Park is awesome.

Agree totally. It is a fantastic place to visit, especially for us gentlemen of a certain incoming middle youth age bracket. And the people there are so nice and knowledgeable.

The Computer Science Museum there run programming workshops for kids to play with BBC Micros etc... It works well because the machines so immediate. When asked 'how long does it take to start a BBC Micro so it's ready to use?' the guesses ranged from 5 minutes to half an hour (!). Instead: One flick of the power switch, half a second and one beep:

It lead eventually to a weird conversation I had in a job interview. The company's product was marketed as being so easy to use that even your mother could use it. Hmm. So in the interview I remarked on the obvious flaw with this line of "reasoning": my mother, in the 1960s, was a senior programmer for LEO (the company) on LEO III machines. Saying it was so easy even she could use it isn't really a strong message...

(Yes, I do know what was meant, which is why I said it to be read as teasing them slightly...)

My mother uses weird white appliances that are adorned with indecipherable symbols, instead of text that clearly says "detergent here" or "spin cycle". She also knows Pascal, on account of a 1980's OU maths degree, but doesn't get on terribly well with modern office suites.

sorry but that should read:

Re: sorry but that should read:

I think you will it was Roosevelt and co. who gave half of Europe to Stalin. They knew how many American deaths there would be if they advanced past Berlin, and decided it was politically unacceptable to have to explain to American mothers why their sons were dead when Hitler would have lost the war anyway.

Interresting from the developmental standpoint

It's using dekatrons which are essentially counters. This hints that it may be based on counting registers, exactly as mechanical calculators did.

In fact there were some desktop calculators like the ANITA which were based on the same principle.

Essentially those calculators were advanced "adding" machines. You could only add to a register by making it count up a number of steps. Subtractions were made by adding complement numbers. So if you wanted to substract 1, you would add 999...999. You could also typically shift the number you wanted to add. So you could add a number times 10 for example. That makes multiplications fairly simple.

In fact on the mechanical machines you often had to do those steps manually.

I think this machine also shows an early approach to computing. It didn't matter that it was just as slow as a human. What mattered was that you could off load work. The computer, in the early days, was a monument to lazyness. People built computers because they couldn't be bothered to do manual computational work. It's much more fun to build a machine to do that sort of work for you, and much cooler, too. :)

Baron Penney

There wouldn't be a US bomb without assistance from the Brits. Check out Baron Penney. A key part of the original US design team.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penney,_Baron_Penney

Strange thing is I knew this guy when I was a kid. His wife used to babysit me and my sister at times. Or we'd go round for tea and cakes. I never knew his background until I saw a BBC documentary on the British Bomb. And there was Lady Penney talking about it... talk about jaw dropping!! Realising I personally knew someone involved with THE bomb certainly makes you think!! (Even more so now I read that Wiki article which shows Penney picked out the targets...)

You may be confusing warheads and MIRVS, I believe the nuclear non-proliferation pact prevents the US selling the UK nukes and they certainly hid behind it when we asked the information on the Manhattan project we'd been promised in exchange for taking part.

Certainly your claim does raise the question of what the fuck AWE Aldermaston has been doing for the last 62 years...

Although I wouldn't believe documentaries, they frequently get stuff wrong.

its a history documentry, the british warhead was`nt 100% stable or something, and the blue streak rocket was`nt finished, so they brought some american rockets, and part of the deal was the warheads that had to be included..

trident nuclear weapons are american and made by lockhead or someone else

either way, i am not bothered, blame it all on a computer that would take 2 months for some physics math, and another 2 month with 1 simple mistake